Nothing to do with virtual schooling or K-12 online learning from the remainder of the day, I wanted to use this forum to remind folks – particularly Canadians – of a dark day in our history.
Twenty years ago today, a 25 year old man walked through the doors of Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal and spent the next 45 minutes hunting women. In the end 14 women lay dead, over a dozen others injured, with the killer having committed suicide. Stories surfaced of how he walked into a classroom, separating the male and female students, then allowing the male students to leave as he began shooting. In the days following, it was discovered that Marc Lepine had applied to the engineering program at Ecole Polytechnic, but was rejected. He blamed this rejection on the school’s affirmative action policy, which he perceived to be passing him over in favour of women. [For those unfamiliar with these, the CBC Archives has a fairly good entry on the Montreal Massacre .]
Months later, the federal Government passed gun control legislation. You see, even those Lepine had been turned down for the military service because he was deemed to have mental issues. And while the military found him unfit to carry a gun, the regulations in Canada at the time allowed him to simply fill out a form, check a box that he was mentally fit, and then he received a permit to allow him to own any kind of firearm available for purchase in Canada – from a simply handgun to a military-style, semi-automatic assault rifle. Primarily due to the events on 06 December 1989 the laws were eventually changed to require a much higher standard for obtaining a firearms acquisition certificate, many of the weapons previous available were banned, and all gun owners had to register their guns in a national registry.
The current Conservative (i.e., right-wing – not the former Progressive Conservatives of old which were more centre/centre-right – this current group is made up largely of elements from the far right of the former Reform Party) have essentially left the gun registry die. It is still on the books, but the Government has not provided the funding, have not done any of the maintenance, etc. to the point where the registry is so out of date that it has become a useless tool for law enforcement. The current Government is even floating ideas that would lift the current restrictions on certain hunting weapons that play well to their rural and western base (as if somehow a rifle used to shoot a deer couldn’t have been used almost as effectively as the weapon that Lepine chose to go hunting with).
On this day, a day which has become known in Canada as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women , remember these women and continue to fight for kind of gun control that would help in preventing this kind of gendercide from happening again